LFI: Anatomie d’une perversion
Edited by Pierre-André Taguieff
David Reinharc, 424 pages, $26
We live in an age of inversions. With class inversion, college-educated professionals have moved inexorably leftwards, while once left-leaning blue-collar workers have veered to the right. A few years ago, there was also talk of a demographic inversion, as affluent populations that used to be drawn to the suburbs moved back to cities. However, few inversions have been as striking as the shifting political valences of antisemitism. In her contribution to Pierre-André Taguieff’s new edited volume on left antisemitism in France, sociologist Eva Illouz describes it this way: “Today, the heirs of Pétain defend the Jews while the [radical] left has become antisemitic.” The National Rally, the party whose founder Jean-Marie Le Pen was repeatedly convicted for making antisemitic remarks, positions itself as a defender of Israel and French Jews, while La France Insoumise (LFI, or Unbowed France), the largest left-wing party, has moved in the other direction.
LFI’s leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has achieved the rare feat of becoming France’s most controversial politician, a title long held first by Le Pen, then by his daughter Marine, whom Mélenchon could well face in the runoff of next year’s presidential election. He has done this in part through his propensity to make comments that test the boundary between criticism of Israel and outright antisemitism. In the pages of Taguieff’s book, the Jewish essayist Alain Finkiekraut says of LFI: “For the first time in my life, I am afraid, physically afraid of a political party.”
Taguieff’s new volume mobilizes the energies of nearly sixty intellectuals to expose Mélenchon’s party as a political “perversion.” Though it considers LFI from multiple angles—extremism, the politics of victimhood, a predilection for “deconstruction”—many of the essays zero in on LFI’s attitude to Jews. Taguieff, a philosopher who studies racism and anti-Semitism, is known for documenting the rise of a “new Judeophobia” in France, associated not with the far right but with French Muslims and hostility to Israel. Taguieff’s work is controversial. Some accuse him of conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and even of exemplifying the racism he criticizes.
Taguieff’s book stands in the tradition of what the French call livres noirs—“black books” that present the dark side of a political phenomenon. Yet while it documents many of LFI’s most troubling features, it also explores the reasons for left-wing antisemitism’s emergence. It raises the question: Why, in 2026, has the Jewish question become central to the left’s current identity?